UPDATED 18:00 EDT / MAY 28 2026

TheCUBE spoke with Steve Lucas, CEO of Boomi, among others, at Boomi World 2026, which covered the rise of the "headless," agentic enterprise and the need for data activation. AI

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of Boomi World 2026

Boomi LP is rejecting the frenzy around artificial intelligence models in favor of addressing the agent enterprise’s biggest obstacles: data activation, governance and execution at scale.

The company, which has roots in integration platform as a service, has homed in on AI governance and cost management. Last year, Boomi announced Agentstudio, a suite of agentic products for monitoring and governing AI agents within one unified space. Now that the agentic enterprise is a reality, Boomi is focused on helping customers build the real-time data pipelines that agents require.

“The AI control plane is hitting Chicago here at Boomi World,” said theCUBE’s John Furrier (pictured, left)“Most people are obsessed over models, token economics … but, at the end of the day, the enterprise is ultimately going to decide because that’s where the work’s getting done, that’s where the agents will thrive as they pivot off or extend off of all the coding values coming out. Agents are the next wave behind the coding — and Boomi’s been [preparing for] this.”

During theCUBE’s exclusive Boomi World broadcast, Furrier and co-host Gemma Allen (second from left) discussed takeaways from the first day keynote, including Boomi’s strategy for building governance into agent-to-agent communication and facilitating data activation. During the event, Furrier and Allen also talked with industry experts about where Boomi and the broader market are headed. (* Disclosure below.)

Here is the complete keynote analysis with John Furrier and Gemma Allen:

And here are three key insights you may have missed from Boomi World 2026:

Insight #1: Data activation is the key to enterprise success.

Data activation — getting the right data to the right systems at machine speed — has remained a stumbling block for companies trying to integrate agentic AI at scale. Legacy systems and the growth of shadow AI continue to hinder enterprises from being AI ready.

“You’ve got to get your arms around your data,” said Steve Lucas, chief executive officer of Boomi. “‘Where is it? Is it of quality? Can I deliver it in real time?’ If you are struggling to deliver data to human intelligence in real time with quality, how do you think that’s going to play out for AI that operates thousands of times faster?”

In addition to cleaning up data pipelines, Boomi’s platform helps orchestrate agents as they gain skills over time. Organizations are increasingly seeking domain-specific AI workflows, according to Lucas. For example, Lexitas, a Chronicle Bidco Inc. company, has automated nearly 50% of its highly regulated payment processing through AI agents on the Boomi platform.

“The first thing that organizations want is domain-specific AI, not generalized AI,” Lucas said. “If I’m a healthcare organization, I want HIPAA-compliant, healthcare-specific, domain-specific AI. Number two [is] they want to understand, ‘How does this plug into my business process?’ We’re gonna go from generalized ROI to domain-specific ROI — very quickly.”

Boomi has announced a collaboration with Red Hat Inc., pairing Boomi’s Agentstudio with Red Hat AI. The goal is to deliver a single integrated stack for agentic AI without exposing enterprise data to frontier model providers.

“Having that container with our runtime, with those models, now you can privatize AI,” Lucas said. “You can build your data geometry — your graph that is unique to your company — not help somebody else build their trillion-dollar company.”

Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Steve Lucas:

Insight #2: The path toward AI ROI involves built-in governance.

Can AI deliver real value? For many enterprises, that question still remains unanswered. However, Boomi sees agentic engineering and fully configured agentic solutions as the best route for getting a return on AI investments.

“I think that since ChatGPT exploded … everyone’s been seeing the inevitability of the AI revolution,” said Matt McLarty, chief technology officer at Boomi. “But, in practice, a lot of enterprises are [saying], ‘It’s hype, but I’m not seeing the value yet.’ The agentic engineering space is really more refined than anywhere else.”

The newly released Boomi Companion, an open-source suite of agentic skills, allows any AI coding agent to build and deploy fully configured Boomi solutions through natural language. McLarty sees it as the better version of vibe coding, since Boomi Companion embeds governance into the agent skills so that all of its outputs are production-ready.

“Getting the balance right between deterministic processing and probabilistic processing is the biggest architectural challenge that’s going to hit the software architecture,” McLarty said. “We went through object-oriented, we went through service-oriented, we went through API-first, microservices — this is a bit of a bigger leap, but it’s the prevailing software architecture practices that introduce probabilistic processing into real-time workloads.”

Boomi also announced Boomi Connect, a managed model context protocol connector service that enables users to employ agents with built-in governance. The product builds on Boomi’s existing AI governance infrastructure to enable controlled data activation, according to Ann Maya, global head of strategic projects and EMEA chief technology officer at Boomi, who spoke with theCUBE alongside Nicole Bradley, principal account executive at Amazon Web Services Inc.

“To have that comfort and security of unlocking your AI potential — activating your data with AI — you have to think about how can [you] control it,” Maya said. “Going forward … you’re just letting it loose but making sure you can control it.”

Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Matt McLarty:

And here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ann Maya and Nicole Bradley:

Insight #3: Agentic AI is changing the role of SaaS applications.

Boomi is preparing for the rise of the “headless enterprise,” where AI models and agents, instead of humans, will become the primary interface for business systems. That transition will not be easy, so Boomi aims to support data activation through the flow of low-latency “liquid data.”

“What [Boomi has] built is a governed data-to-agent platform,” Furrier said during a day 2 keynote analysis with Allen. “What that means is data and agents will talk natively, [with] very fast latency, and that’s gonna happen very much across the entire enterprise. You have got to have the governed version of that, so they’re building the governance into that paradigm.”

The shift toward agent-to-agent communication is also transforming SaaS applications. Now the emphasis will be less on SaaS applications’ user interfaces and more on their ability to facilitate the flow of data between agents, according to Ed Macosky, chief product and technology officer at Boomi.

“We are laser focused on [how we’ve] simplified the development of agents,” he said. “Over this next year, helping our enterprise customers unlock the workloads that they want to agentify — that they can’t unlock in a secure way — is what I’m excited about for the next frontier.”

Here is theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ed Macosky:

And here is theCUBE’s complete day two keynote analysis with John Furrier and Gemma Allen:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of Boomi World 2026, here’s our complete event video playlist:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Boomi World. Neither Boomi, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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